


Finding a Balance

by Amonae



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Bucky needs a hug, Fluff, Identity Porn, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 10:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7046656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amonae/pseuds/Amonae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He didn’t speak to the man in the suit any of the times he showed up in the following weeks, always between five thirty and six thirty in the morning, usually on a weekday. Not that Bucky was keeping track. From the corner. Behind the ficus he had given Stevie on his birthday several years ago, which had since outgrown the apartment they once shared.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding a Balance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orbingarrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orbingarrow/gifts).



> Thank you SO MUCH for the last minute betas from missdreawrites and Kuchen. I cannot even begin to explain what a mess this would be without you. Any remaining errors are completely my own. This was written for the WinterIron Spring Fling 2016.

His coffee was lukewarm, bordering on cold by the time the bell above the door chimed, announcing yet another early-morning customer. Bucky had started coming to the little coffee shop on 17th the second it opened a week and a half ago. It hadn’t been his first choice, he would have preferred to keep making his coffee in the ancient, somewhat calcium-crusted, machine in his kitchen. He’d quickly realized that keeping to himself wasn’t an option.

“Buck, c’mon. I know you’re in there, and I brought pizza.” Steve had stopped pounding on the door but he still lingered outside like a kicked puppy. Bucky finally relented and pulled back all the locks, peering through the crack afforded by the chain. 

He eyed the pizza box with reluctance. “No mushrooms?”

“You think I don’t know that you hate ‘em by now?” Steve was clutching the box between thin fingers stained dark with charcoal, a half-scowl etched onto his features. He nudged the door with a foot, the chain rattling as it caught the movement. “Let me in. I gotta talk to you about something.”

With a grunt, Bucky snapped the door shut and pulled back the chain, sliding it along the rails and trying not the let the noise stick to his guts. Still sounded too much like loading a magazine into an AK-47 for his liking. He must have paused after removing the chain, since the next thing he knew the door was opening toward him, leaving him with no choice but to step back or get cracked in the face. Stevie didn’t seem to notice, or if he did he didn’t bring it up, ‘cause he just kept chattering on as Bucky’s mind filtered back to the present.

“And we’ve started on figure drawing but I think I’m gonna need more practice. Head down to Central Park, people watch for a while, you know?” Steve headed straight for the kitchen, Bucky following slowly after his lithe figure. The blond didn’t mention the piles of mail or clusters of delivery containers stacked on varying surfaces, just shuffled them aside so he had room to set down the pizza. There was a silence, one that lingered too long and hung heavy with implication. 

Bucky waited for the other shoe to drop.

“I got a job. Little coffee joint just across from that video rental place on 17th. It’s opening tomorrow and it’ll be easy to work around my classes.” Steve was looking for plates, coming up empty as each cupboard revealed nothing more than dust motes or a few canned goods. Eventually, he gave up and pulled down a roll of paper towels instead. Bucky wasn’t quite sure where they came from in the first place, though they had probably been delivered by Steve on a previous trip.

Steve was watching him, waiting for an answer, so he cleared his throat and tried to speak around a mouthful of unease. “That’s good, Stevie. You were… looking for a job, right?”

More silence, a bit of fidgeting before Stevie got that determined look that said he was digging in his heels and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Bucky waited for the offer that was sure to be damning.

“I want you to come with me to the shop.”

The face he was making must have been awful, given the way Stevie back-tracked and jumped all over his own words in his haste to amend them. “Not to work, just… to get out. You’re in here too much, all cooped up. You need to get out more. You know what the evaluation said…”

Bucky couldn’t keep himself from letting a low snarl curl the edge of his lip. “I know what they said.” Get out, be social, re-integrate into society. Like it was all so easy. Like he wasn’t seeing threats around every corner or analyzing escape routes in every new venue. “I can’t.”

“You can. Just come during my shifts, you don’t have to stay long, and if you come right when it opens it won’t even be busy. Please, Buck? Just… try?”

He knew it had been hard on their friendship when he came back from the service, down an arm and up a mental disorder or five, but Stevie had stuck with him through those first few months. Through the hardest weeks—the ones where he couldn’t keep himself from sleeping beneath the bed frame or from jumping every time he heard a car door slam—Steve had stuck with him.

The least he could do was _try_ to get through a single cup of coffee in a public setting.

“Fine,” Bucky huffed, trying to show his displeasure but winding up with a half-mangled smile on his features instead. “Punk.”

“Thanks.” Steve’s answering grin was brilliant. “Jerk.”

They devoured the pizza in less than ten minutes, grease dripping down their palms as they talked about anything without substance—the weather, last night’s ball game, a new artistic method Steve had picked up in class. They didn’t talk about the mess that was Bucky’s apartment, or the impending train wreck that the next morning was sure to be.

But the morning wasn’t awful. Bucky woke at the crack of dawn, the muscles of his left shoulder aching as he stretched what was left of his arm. He pulled on a tee shirt and then a button-down, pinning the left sleeve with practiced ease before tugging on a tattered pair of jeans and jamming his feet into ragged combat boots. On his way out the door he slipped into his jacket and a ball cap, not giving himself time to analyze click of his deadbolt or the sound of his feet on the hall carpet. His building was quiet most of the time, the majority of tenants being well past the age of retirement, and that morning was no exception. He managed to hurry his way through the stairwells and out the front of the tenement, only pausing twice to flash a glance over his shoulder.

The shop was right where Stevie said it would be, surrounded by normally-crowded streets that were left still with the silence of the dawn. There was a little sign at the window, currently turned around to display a block-lettered ‘CLOSED’ with a listing of their hours. They didn’t open for another ninety minutes. Bucky felt his stomach churn, had he gotten the hours wrong?

“You came.”

Steve had managed to sneak up on him while he glowered at the little sign. “It’s closed.”

“Yeah, Nat’ll let us in though.” Steve stepped forward and rapped his knuckles in a quick rhythm against the glass. Moments later, a petite redhead pulled open the door, sparing only a quick glance in Bucky’s direction before stepping back to allow them to shuffle inside. He tried not to flinch when he heard her locking the door again behind them. 

“Come on, Rogers. I have a lot to explain before we open, and I need this to go perfectly.” ‘Nat’ had a commanding presence, her features schooled into a flat expression and arms folded across her chest or propped against her hips as she walked Steve to the counter and started explaining the basics. After a few moments of speaking she turned to Bucky again, face as neutral as before. “Make yourself at home. Let Rogers know if you want anything to drink.”

Bucky didn’t know what she’d been told; he hoped it wasn’t everything about what a pathetic shut-in he’d become (he knew he was being pathetic about it, didn’t need some damn therapist to tell him that), but he was grateful for her quiet calm. She wasn’t asking questions, wasn’t pushing him, wasn’t even approaching without a quick moment of eye-contact first to gauge the situation.

If he didn’t know better, he’d assume she’d dealt with this kind of shit before.

So he started coming on a more regular basis, mostly to avoid the later-morning crowds but also to ensure that Steve wouldn't nag him to death. Nat—short for Natasha, he learned—never pressured him and he found himself trusting her with a quickness that would have struck him as unusual, had she been anyone else. He chose the wee hours of the morning to get in his daily quota of “socialization,” when most ordinary people were still rising bleary-eyed from their beds. 

But the man who just entered the shop looked anything but ordinary. 

The crisp lines of his suit pulled Bucky's gaze along strong shoulders and across the gentle line of the stranger's back as he leaned on the counter to place his order, quite obviously making an attempt to flirt with Natasha (who leveled him with the same flat look she gave every customer who attempted the same). Bucky caught himself staring just before the narrow flare of the suit’s waist pulled his gaze to a pair of matching trousers stretched obscenely across a perfect, pert—

“Triple espresso, two shots of water, no sweetener, no cream.” Natasha rattling off the man’s order snapped Bucky’s attention to the counter and away from where his eyes had been wandering. She flashed the slightest flicker of a gaze in his direction; yeah, too late, she saw him watching. 

With his attention glued to the scarred surface of the small table he occupied, Bucky listened for the sound of footsteps and the quiet chime of the bell, announcing the stranger’s departure. When he looked up again, Natasha was no longer behind the counter. He barely had time to brace himself before he heard her quiet voice whispering just shy of his left ear, “I think that’s the first time I saw something other than sullen disapproval in your eyes, James.”

Jolting, he felt an incomprehensible need to protect his injured—disabled, he reminded himself—side. Bucky narrowed his eyes at her for an instant. He grumbled an affirmative and turned back to his coffee, now lukewarm, hoping to avoid any further prodding about his behavior.

“You should talk to him, next time he comes in,” she offered with a brief squeeze to his shoulder, a touch that would have made him flinch less than a week ago, but Natasha had a way of making him feel at ease. Probably that something lurking just beneath her own icy demeanor that only Bucky seemed capable of picking up. She stepped away as another customer slipped into the café. “Might do you some good.” 

Bucky grunted as she slipped off, glowering down at the swirl of creamer in his coffee.

*

He didn’t speak to the man in the suit any of the times he showed up in the following weeks, always between five thirty and six thirty in the morning, usually on a weekday. Not that Bucky was keeping track. From the corner. Behind the ficus he had given Stevie on his birthday several years ago, which had since outgrown the apartment they once shared.

Sometimes Bucky missed that, the casual ease they had before he shipped out and returned missing more than his arm. They had known each other since childhood and more often than not Bucky was pulling his punk ass out of fights he would pick but had no chance in hell of winning. He supposed it spoke of karma that little Stevie would be the one to piece him back together after a war with no end and no purpose had brought him home in tatters. He was better, now. At least that was what he told himself when he managed to leave the house and fetch groceries, or answered the door without an overwhelming rush of panic about who might await him on the other side. Sure, he still didn’t watch television or read the news, but he was improving. Baby steps.

The man in the suit didn’t seem like the kind of person who needed to get his life together. He seemed like a person who had everything laid out at his feet, precisely in the order he intended. Which is exactly why Bucky had no intention of ever speaking to him. He was perfectly content to hide out in his dimly-lit corner and watch from beneath the brim of his ragged Dodgers cap.

Until Steve and Natasha cornered him during a lull in customers one morning, wearing dual expressions of unhappy disdain. 

Bucky looked up from the novel he had been trying, and failing, to get through since last Christmas. “What?”

“You need to talk to him, Buck.” Steve was looking determined, well, as determined as his lithe frame could look with skinny arms crossed over his chest and a smudge of either charcoal or mocha syrup smudged across his cheek. He’d taken to working on his sketches when it was a slow day at the shop. Natasha didn’t seem to mind.

“Instead of mooning from behind the damn foliage,” Natasha added, her level glare doing a lot more to sway his opinions than Steve’s disgruntled pout.

With a frown, he closed his paperback after dog-earring the page. “Thanks but no thanks.”

“Buck—” Steve started but was cut off by the abrupt screech of the chair legs against the wooden floorboards. 

“No, Stevie. He won’t be interested. Trust me, there’s no way someone like that is interested in someone like…” he frowned, motioning with his good arm to the pinned sleeve on his left shoulder, “me.”

He ignored any hollow protests and left the shop before Stevie could start going on about something as inane as his personality. Bucky damn well knew where he stood when it came to his appearance, he didn’t need to make an ass out of himself in front of a handsome stranger to prove that. It wasn’t until he was halfway down the block that he realized Natasha hadn’t voiced a single protest to him storming from the cafe. Generally, that meant she already had a secondary plan of action in place.

Well, shit.

*

It took a few days for Bucky to make up his mind and come back to the cafe. He was still kind of upset with the pair of baristas for trying to goad him into making an ass of himself with a stranger, but at the end of the day, he couldn’t hide out in his apartment forever.

And they made damn good coffee.

“Sorry, Buck. Just be a minute. The machine’s on the fritz this morning, so we’re only able to brew one pot at a time.” Steve puttered away with the ancient brewer, wiping a mess of grinds from the drip with a clean cloth. He didn’t seem nearly as frazzled as he would have under normal opening conditions, given the circumstances, but Bucky just leaned on the pick-up counter to watch his friend fight the machine. He wasn’t going to complain; after all, his coffee was free under some bull shit “veteran’s discount” that Stevie made up on the spot. Natasha didn’t even seem to mind, especially when Bucky tried to argue against it. She almost appeared amused by his failed attempts to shove a few bills at Steve’s hands. He could pay for his own coffee, damn it.

He learned pretty quick to stop fighting it, or the shop’s coffee grounds started showing up at his apartment by the bag. He should have never given Steve the spare key.

Without his first cup of morning coffee, and with Steve puttering away behind the counter, mumbling quietly to himself, Bucky found his guard dropping. His right elbow was balanced against the counter, chin propped in his palm as he tried to keep his eyes open. The soft sounds of old forties jazz drifting from the overhead speakers weren’t helping with the level of his alertness. Supposed to keep customers calm and mellow his ass—probably just kept people groggy enough to be coming back for another cup of coffee. He barely noticed when Steve started speaking to him, instead of muttering to the decrepit machine, but he lifted his head at the sound.

“Buck, just a sec. I gotta see if we have any Sumatra in the back.”

Bucky nodded and rested his chin in his hand again, allowing his eyes to slip shut for just a moment. It wasn’t until he heard the chime from above the door that he realized the time, and his error in believing Stevie’s antics with the machine.

“Hello?” The well-dressed stranger called, leaning against the order counter and glancing around the large espresso machine, as if seeking Steve’s slight frame behind the considerable bulk of the metallic beast. 

“Sorry, Tony! Be with you in a minute,” Steve said as he returned from the storage room, completely ignoring the wide-eyed stare of betrayal and bewilderment that Bucky was tossing in his general direction. 

“No problem. I’ve got time this morning,” the stranger—Tony—answered, flashing a dazzling smile over the counter that had Bucky’s heart hammering somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. 

He didn’t even realize he was clutching the edge of the counter with his good arm, his body a line of tension, until Stevie put his usual mug of coffee (with just the right amount of creamer) on the marbled surface. 

“Here ya go, Buck. Sorry for the wait.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes, only just noticing that the coffee pot had been running the whole time the blond was tucked away in the back room, probably wasting time until the man in the suit—Tony, he reminded himself, _Tony_ —came into the shop for the morning. Six fifteen on the dot, right on time. 

If he could glare daggers through Stevie’s well-layered placidity, he would have, but as it stood his so-called friend just grinned at him and went about tidying the coffee bar to prepare the usual triple-shot espresso for Tony. Punk.

“Buck, huh? That’s an interesting name.” 

His shoulder twitched, the man’s voice a lot closer than he had expected, right next to him against the small pick-up counter. Bucky managed to keep himself from moving away, just barely. “It’s Bucky, actually. And a nickname, sort of.” He’s internally cursing his inability to hold a normal conversation, sick of feeling his mouth fumble and trip over the words, but he was startled out of his downward emotional spiral by a short bark of laughter.

“Still one hell of a nickname. I’m Tony, by the way.” The stranger—Tony—is offering Bucky his hand and he had to rush to settle his mug down on the counter before reaching out his right hand, giving Tony’s a quick shake. When Tony didn’t immediately relinquish his grip, Bucky could feel the uneasy flush crawling up the back of his neck, threatening the tips of his ears. “Maybe some time I can hear the story behind it?”

“Why?”

Bucky could practically hear Stevie rolling his eyes, even if his line of sight was obscured by the enormous espresso machine. But Tony didn’t seem deterred by Bucky’s harsh response, his grin softening slightly into something a little more private. “Because,” he started, taking his to-go cup from Steve with a single, fluid motion, “seems like one hell of a story.” 

With a quick wave the man was on his way, through the door and into the street before Bucky could even pick his jaw up off the counter. He was pretty out of touch with the whole flirting scene, but he was sure that there had been some real hard bedroom eyes thrown his way. Looked an awful lot how Maggie, the cute redhead down the hall from him and Steve, leered at him before he shipped off. Especially when he left the apartment in uniform.

“See?” Steve piped up from where he was loading up another carafe into the coffee maker. “He’s interested.”

With a quiet grunt, he retrieved his mug and concentrated on not squeezing it too tight with the tension that raked through his shoulders. He was pretty sure this was all a bad idea, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least get to know someone, someone besides Steve and Nat and the loud-mouthed delivery man—he was pretty sure his name was Clint—who dropped off the pastries three times a week.

*

Tony started coming to the cafe every day.

Sure, on some mornings it was just for a quick hello and to grab his usual order, but on others he would take his time. He would get his espresso in a little ceramic cup on a saucer and a tiny dish of pastries from the display before drifting toward Bucky, who was hunched up at his usual table in the corner. The first few times, he’d let Tony do all the talking, more than happy just to listen to him go on about new projects or lick the sticky-sweet glaze off his fingers. Tony was an engineer, of sorts. He worked with machines and created things for people to use every day, like cell phones. He’d gone on for an hour about their usefulness when Bucky mentioned he didn’t own one and had no intentions to.

The next morning Tony brought him a brand new phone, with a solid looking case wrapped around the delicate circuitry. “Right off the assembly line,” he’d said, trying hard to look casual about it but Bucky could see the little burns, probably from a soldering iron, around his knuckles. It wasn’t from any damn assembly line.

“Tony, you didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to,” he insisted before Bucky could even finish his sentence. “It’s better than whatever shit model some sales rep is going to try to pitch you, and this one can take a bit more of a beating than those things they’re importing from overseas these days.”

Bucky knew, despite his attempts to cover it up, that Tony had noticed how he would sometimes fumble things, drop them without meaning to. He’d broken his fair share of mugs in the coffee shop. Instead of the irritation or anger he would normally feel if it were brought up, he felt a small, warm ache in the center of his chest. “It’s too much,” he whispered, clutching the metal casing hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

“It was nothing,” Tony answered, laying his hand across Bucky’s. The touch was too gentle, too brief, before it was gone entirely and Tony was giving him that half-fond smile he sometimes had when they were mostly alone. “Plus, how else will I get a hold of you?”

Bucky stared at him with crumpled brows. “But we always meet here.” He wondered if Tony was going to stop coming by the cafe and this was his way of letting the ex-soldier down easy.

“Maybe I want to see you outside of here, sometime,” Tony answered, his voice soft and warm and going straight to the center of Bucky’s gut.

_Oh._

“That would be…” Bucky fumbled with his words, trying to find something relatively neutral but still conveying the strange, fluttering excitement he felt growing in his chest, “…good.” He clenched his jaw and resisted the urge to run his hand over his face. Somehow, even with all that stalling, ‘good’ was the best thing his muddled brain could come up with. 

Tony didn’t seem deterred. “Good,” he said, smile still etched onto his features. “Maybe I’ll give you a call this week, see if you’re free?”

Bucky almost blurted out that he was always free, but he held himself back and settled for a gruff nod instead. He didn’t want to seem desperate, or for Tony to think any less of him since he was currently without work. It didn’t seem to change the mood drifting hesitantly between them and before he knew it, Tony was heading off for the day, leaving Bucky to stare at the brand new device with a furrow in his brow.

*

The first time the phone went off, it scared the living piss out of him.

Bucky hadn’t expected the damn thing to be so _loud_. Though, to be fair, in the quiet of his apartment, anything would seem loud. It was a single, shrill chime that broke through the stillness shortly after seven pm. A text message. It took him much longer than he wanted to admit to slide back the lock screen and fumble through the menus to locate the little blurb, but when he did, he found a grin creeping across his face.

__

Want to grab lunch tomorrow? My treat. -T

He managed to work out a short reply, fighting the waves of anxiety that came with placing himself in a new scenario. It would be all right. He could do this, it would make Tony happy. And he kept finding himself wanting to make Tony happy.

Somehow, he and Tony wound up talking. A lot. And not always at the little coffee shop on 17th but sometimes at the Italian Deli on 6th or among the bright green foliage of Central Park. Once, though Bucky put up on hell of a fight about it, they spent the evening at some ritzy restaurant on Broadway, Bucky feeling itchy and trapped beneath the material of his borrowed suit. The phone, though it had taken some getting used to, was rarely far from reach as Tony had the tendency to send Bucky little texts during the day and had nothing but unfathomable patience when it came to Bucky’s fumbling replies.

Things between them started to change, and though they hadn’t said as much, the relationship seemed to be leaning more toward something romantic instead of just friendship. Bucky wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, at first, but he knew he’d been feeling happier, less tense, since he started seeing Tony outside of the cafe.

They were dating. 

At least, that’s what Bucky would have called it had he been the one doing all the courting, taking some nice girl out for fancy lunches or quiet walks on the pier. He didn’t know what Tony saw in him, in the scarred half-remains of the man that he was, but time and again Tony insisted it didn’t matter. Tony was gorgeous, and wealthy (if the constant battle for the check was any indication), and surely had his pick of the elite to spend his time with—Bucky didn’t understand why it was him.

“You’re being an idiot,” Natasha told him over poker, their table already looking fairly one-sided as she examined her hand and the stack of chips before her.

Steve grunted an agreement before folding his cards against the tabletop. “You’re overthinking it. You’re happy, right?”

With a frown, Bucky looked over his hand and stacked a few chips in the center of the table. “Call. And yeah, I mean… I guess?”

“You guess?” Nat’s brows were arched threateningly, but he was saved from the lecture by Clint chiming in.

“Raise. And come on, what’s not to love about a boyfriend that can pretty much buy you the Empire State building?” he chimed, tossing a stack of chips on the table before grabbing a cookie from the nearby plate. 

“How many of those have you eaten?” Natasha asked.

“My cookies, my house, my body. I get to eat as many as I damn well please,” he mumbled around a mouthful of crumbs.

“Don’t come crying to me when your cookie consumption starts affecting your business.”

“Like you wouldn’t buy from me. No one else makes vatrushka the way you like it and you know it.”

Bucky listened to them bicker, not for the first time wondering if there was more to their relationship than the strictly professional friendship they insisted on. He was drifting off, letting his thoughts slip away from him, so he barely noticed when Stevie leaned in to whispered into his ear. “I’m happy for you, Buck. Really. You seem… better.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but he felt a hell of a lot better. Worth something, maybe, to somebody who didn’t know how many marshmallows he could fit in his mouth or who his childhood hero had been. Steve was great, and even Natasha and Clint had been accepting of his many… eccentricities, but he wanted something more. Something that almost seemed plausible now, where before it had been nothing more than a shadow in his mind.

Of course, that’s when it all went to shit.

*

The evening started out normally enough; Bucky managed to convince Tony that a quiet stroll along the boardwalk would be just as good as an evening at the casino (he still couldn’t face someplace that noisy, and he hadn’t brought up his situation in conversation, too worried it would make things awkward). They were walking side by side, close but not quite touching, and all it would take for them to close the gap was for Bucky to reach out his hand a fraction of an inch. He wanted to, kept sneaking glances out of the corner of his eye to see if Tony was thinking along the same lines, but it was too hard to read his expression in the dim evening light. If he hadn’t been so focused on the man next to him, he might have noticed that they were being followed.

“‘Scuse me, Mister Stark? Could I get a quick photo?”

The kid couldn’t have been older than twenty but everything in Tony’s demeanor changed from that instant onward. His face shuttered, the ease of his smile morphing into something tight and hard and practiced. Bucky didn’t like it, felt his hackles rising as this stranger turned his falsely-bright grin to the kid with his camera. And the name the kid had used, _Stark_ , sounded so familiar but every time Bucky tried to piece together where he’d heard it, the thoughts slipped through the cracks in his mind like water.

“Yeah, no. Not tonight, bud. I’ve got a press conference first thing in the morning, you can take as many shots as you want at that.”

“No can do, Mister Stark. I’m gonna be halfway across town covering another story.”

“Rough luck, kid. Maybe next time,” he answered, placing a hand at the small of Bucky’s back and trying to steer them away from the inevitable confrontation. Bucky could feel his anxiety bubbling like a roiling unease beneath the surface. He tried to focus on the warmth of Tony’s palm through the layers of clothing but all he could do was swallow each wave of nausea that threatened him with every step.

“C’mon, Mister. Just a quick shot of you and your new man!”

If Bucky thought Tony had been tense before, that was nothing when compared to the way his body went taut as a bowstring when the kid brought up their relationship. They were already on tentative ground—this thing between them new and fragile and lacking a name—and Bucky was starting to feel like he was maybe in a lot deeper than Tony had been. Was what they had between them something to be ashamed of? Is that why Tony was having such a strong reaction to this young reporter trying to get some sort of a story out of them? Or had Bucky mis-read the situation from the very start? He was backtracking in his mind, trying to pick up any hints he may have missed when he heard Tony speak up again.

“Sorry, kid, some other time.” And that was it, Tony was steering them quickly toward where his car was parked at the curb. Bucky could hear the sound of the camera shutter and the heavy heat of Tony’s hand against the small of his back. 

It made him feel sick.

*

Once Bucky had been deposited at his apartment, spending most of the drive back in a sullen silence since it wasn’t filled with Tony’s usual chatter, he called up Steve.

“I need to borrow your laptop.”

“Well hello, Steve. How nice to talk to you. It’s not at all an obscene hour to call someone who has to be at work for five thirty in the morning,” Steve drawled on the other end of the line, though Bucky could hear the distinct sound of charcoal on paper in the background.

“Like you weren’t already up. Laptop.”

“Why are you so interested in it now? You know what, nevermind. Just come over. You can explain when you get here.”

The line went dead and Bucky felt a sudden reluctance to complete his task, the anger that had fueled his desire fizzling quick in the darkness of his apartment. Steve’s apartment wasn’t far, but it meant pulling himself from the comfort of his own home yet again for the day. But something had felt off about Tony’s behavior, the way he had ushered Bucky out of there felt almost like… 

Almost like he was embarrassed to be seen with him. 

The feelings that arose from that coiled like a viper in the pit of his stomach, something poisonous and deadly, ready to strike at any moment. Bucky stifled the urge to cry out, to do something rash. Boots. Jacket. Leave. Every motion was mechanical, forced.

He wound up on the cracked stoop of Steve’s apartment some twenty-odd minutes later, his glare leveled at a weed pushing its way up through the crevasse. To his relief, and confusion, Stevie didn’t pester him about the reasoning behind suddenly needing to do an internet search at eleven thirty on a Thursday night. He just settled Bucky on the couch, gave him a crash course on how to use the computer, and let him know that he would be in his room should Bucky have any questions.

It was suspicious, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it. He pulled up a browser and got to work, typing slowly with his right hand. T-O-N-Y S-T-A-R-K. 

Whatever he expected, the wall of search results including everything from GQ to that week’s tabloid magazines wasn’t it. Apparently, though he should have guessed by Tony’s wealth and his penchant for flair, Bucky had been dating a: genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist (Tony’s words, not his, from an article in Vanity Fair). Though most of the articles had been curious, to an extreme extent, about the identity of Tony’s new “beau,” more than enough of them had caught Bucky’s eye as being less-than-flattering.

If there was one thing he didn’t want to be, it was somebody’s charity case.

Then there were the military articles; weaponry designs were what made Stark Industries famous, after all. While looking through an article that questioned the morality of some kind of sleeper bombs Stark had designed, a photograph left Bucky frozen, his hand hovering over the track pad. 

_This_ was why the name ‘Stark’ had sounded so familiar to him. Why it made him feel as though his guts were churning inside out, why it made pain flare through an arm that was no longer there. Bucky clenched his teeth and gripped the stump that remained on his left shoulder.

Stark had made the bomb that had very nearly cost Bucky every aspect of his life. His arm, his sanity, and very nearly his relationship with the only person in the whole world he considered family.

Not knowing how to feel, let alone process the information that had been thrust at him, Bucky closed the lid to the computer and set it on the end table perhaps a little more violently than required. It had taken all of his self control not to let his good arm squeeze the damn monitor as hard as he could. He left the apartment without a word to Stevie, pain roiling through him and burning at the corners of his eyes.

*

Bucky didn’t come to the coffee shop. Even when threatened with bodily harm (Natasha) and spiders in his pillow (Clint). Steve, for the most part, seemed quietly accepting of Bucky’s decision to vehemently ignore all of Tony’s attempts to contact him. In fact, he didn’t bring up the man more than to note in passing conversation that he had switched from three shot to four shot espressos. Bucky knew this was Steve’s way of saying that Tony was tired and looked it, but he decided to ignore that fact.

Though he missed the daily routine and his ‘dates’—could they even be called that if they had never claimed to be dating? If they never had that first kiss?—with Tony, Bucky kept himself firmly within the confines of his apartment, attempting to finish that novel he never managed to get through. He had fallen asleep on the couch reading again when he heard the click of the lock, awake and on high alert in seconds. He sat up and squinted toward the door, keeping the bulk of his body angled behind the back of the couch, just in time to see Steve slipping through. The blond was balancing a tray with two coffees, a large paper bag, and a rolled up newspaper tucked between it all.

“Just me,” Stevie called with a shuffle of the tray to substitute as a wave. “Got coffee and some of Clint’s “Kitchen Sink” cookies.”

Bucky perked up and abandoned his book, yet again. “The ones with the potato chips?”

Steve smiled, seeming to know his bribe was working. “Yes, the ones with the potato chips.” He set the whole armful of supplies on the kitchen counter, turning to lean on it as Bucky approached. “Look, I know you don’t want to see Tony, but could you at least stop by the shop again? We miss you.”

Bucky flinched, eyeing the bag of cookies just behind Steve’s elbow. He wondered if he could just snag them and run, but Stevie seemed to read his mind, moving to stand more fully in front of the treats. Shit.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Steve asked, a golden brow raised and his look skeptical.

“Okay. I’ll stop by sometimes. Maybe in the afternoon?”

Steve’s slight frame seemed to relax and he stepped aside, holding out the bag of cookies and the coffee as a truce. Bucky took the bag first, setting it on the small kitchen table and stuffing two of the cookies in his mouth before he reached for his coffee, which Steve was still patiently holding out for him. “Thought you might wanna read the paper. Something kind of interesting about prosthetics on the front page,” he said, motioning to the newspaper as he took his own coffee cup from the tray. “I gotta get back. Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t become one with the couch.”

“Very funny. Punk,” Bucky teased, adding his cardboard cup to the pile of things on the table and rustling his fingers through blond strands. “We still on for poker tomorrow night?”

“You bet. Unless something better comes up,” Steve answered on his way to the door, his look distinctly smug.

“Don’t count on it,” Bucky answered as he closed the door, twisting the lock before returning to his coffee. He ate another cookie before attempting the newspaper, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest. Stevie had said that the story he wanted was on the front page, so it wasn’t likely that he would be assaulted with anything that might send him into a spiralling panic. Still, he was anxious as he flipped open the black and white folds. 

The headline was actually announcing a brand new breakthrough in prosthetics, something that was “bound to change the lives of millions of Americans,” according to the article. Bucky read on, brow furrowed as time and again, Stark Industries came up as the major proponent in developing and releasing said prosthetics, at a fraction of their valued cost. Enough that even Bucky could afford it on his Government checks. 

He clutched at the stump of his left arm, rubbing the scar tissue through the folded cotton of his tee shirt sleeve, feeling the ache of a limb no longer there. If these things really worked… it would be life-changing. 

There was an interview included in the article, someone asking Tony a thousand inane questions about development and design and deployment, but one query in particular caught Bucky’s attention among all the others. 

“Mister Stark, you claim you had an inspiration, a muse, if you will, for your latest project. Tell us a little bit about them?”

“Well, Nancy, I don’t know how much I can really say. I have—had, a friend that lost his arm overseas, let that define the way he was living his life. I didn’t want that, didn’t want him to see himself as only what he was missing, because what was left, well… that was a hell of a lot more than I ever deserved in a friend.”

Bucky read and re-read the lines, feeling the flush race along the back of his neck and over his ears and cheekbones before he could really stop it. He had been fiddling with the paper sleeve on his coffee cup as he poured through the article and it was all but destroyed at this point, tattered around the font lining the cup. He peered at it—when had Natasha changed the to-go cups? There were precise little lines of text, wrapping around the cup until the very bottom. It wasn’t until he spotted his name among them that he realized this wasn’t a new branding scheme, it was a note, directed at him. He tore off the protective sleeve and twisted the cup around to read through the miniaturized memo.

__

Bucky, I’m sorry. I’m not too great with saying what needs to be said, when it needs to be said. I don’t blame you if you stop reading here, I’ve been a colossal idiot. You probably don’t want to be pulled into… all of this. It’s a lot of time in the spotlight, and I have to tell you, most of it is unpleasant, at best. But you were the one good thing in my life, the person who managed to pry me away from my comfort zone to keep coming back to some tiny coffee shop in Brooklyn every morning. I miss you. If you feel the same, even a little, or maybe you just want to punch me for not telling you who I am sooner… meet me at the cafe at 6 am.

He clutched the cup in his hand as he bolted from the apartment, taking the stairs three at a time.

It was nearly six. He didn’t want to be late.

*

Six o’clock rolled by, no big deal. Five after six had Tony picking at the edge of an environmentally-friendly napkin. Ten after six and the napkin was no more than a pile of ragged shreds on the counter.

“He’s not coming,” Tony said, twisting three of the paper bits between his fingers until they were nothing more than a crumbled mess. 

“Stark. Calm down. He might not have seen the note.”

“How could he not have seen the note?!”

Natasha narrowed her eyes—god, that glare could cut through iron—and Tony felt his face crumple into something like a petulant frown. Okay, sure, maybe Bucky hadn’t seen the note. Maybe the note had been too over-the-top and he’d scared the man off. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested.

Tony groaned into his arms, which he had folded on the countertop to keep himself from slamming his head against the solid formica. He was about to give up, throw in the towel and just head to the office early, when he heard the distinct sound of the chime above the door. When he pried his face from his arms, Natasha was smirking in the general direction of the doorway. He couldn’t turn fast enough, heart thundering in his chest when he saw Bucky leaning hard against the doorframe with his left shoulder, his hand clutched around a paper coffee cup. _The_ paper coffee cup. 

He felt his cheeks starting to flare and he rushed to fill the ragged silence with something besides the harsh sound of Bucky catching his breath. “Look, I, uh… I know that wasn’t exactly the best way to go about this sort of thing but you wouldn’t answer my calls and I could only creep around your building for so long without notice and I wasn’t even sure if Steve would agree to carry the message and…”

“Tony.” The voice was close, right in front of him, and Tony wasn’t even aware that he had lowered his gaze. His eyes snapped up, meeting a whorl of emotion in brown eyes. Something changed in Bucky’s features—they softened, and Tony realized he was smiling only a second before the man spoke again. “You’re an idiot.”

He was vaguely aware of Natasha cat-calling behind the bar, though his focus had narrowed to the sensation of lips, dry and a little chapped, pressed hesitantly against his own. Nothing else mattered but that moment, surrounded by the smell of freshly roasted coffee beans and the wispy trill of jazz, and the feel of a warm, solid mass against his front.


End file.
